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UbiComp is a premier interdisciplinary venue in which leading international researchers, designers, developers, and practitioners in the field present and discuss novel results in all aspects of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This includes the design, development, and deployment of ubiquitous and pervasive computing technologies and the understanding of human experiences and social impacts that these technologies facilitate.

UbiComp 2018 will be held from October 8 to 12 in Singapore, and as in past years will be co-located with ISWC 2018 (with a single registration fee).
New publication model

Starting with the 2017 edition, UbiComp no longer considers full paper or note submissions. Instead, it will invite for presentation papers published by the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT). IMWUT has 1 volume per year with 4 issues per volume, published in March (Issue 1), June (Issue 2), September (Issue 3), and December 1 (Issue 4).

The UbiComp 2018 main technical tracks will consist of papers in IMWUT 2017 Issue 4 and IMWUT 2018 Issues 1-3. Authors of these papers will be invited, but are not obliged, to present at UbiComp. The conference will retain its workshop, poster, and demo tracks, which will have their own publication outlet.

Detailed information about IMWUT — including submission instructions and a description of its reviewing process — is available at: http://imwut.acm.org. Information about the rationale for changing the publication model is available below.
Submission Deadlines and Associated Publication Issues

IMWUT has 4 deadlines per year: February 15, May 15, August 15, and November 15. We expect a quick publication schedule. For instance, papers submitted on February 15 may be published as soon as in the June issue, if the review process indicates only minor revisions are required.
August 15, 2017

Papers with minor revisions will appear in IMWUT 2017 Issue 4 (December 1, 2017)
Papers with major revisions which are subsequently accepted may appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 1 or IMWUT 2018 Issue 2 depending on the resubmission deadline chosen by the author.

November 15, 2017

Papers with minor revisions will appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 1 (March 1, 2018)
Papers with major revisions which are subsequently accepted may appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 2 or IMWUT 2018 Issue 3 depending on the resubmission deadline chosen by the author

February 15, 2018

Papers with minor revisions will appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 2 (June 1, 2018)
Papers with major revisions which are subsequently accepted may appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 3 or IMWUT 2018 Issue 4 depending on the resubmission deadline chosen by the author. Papers appearing in Issue 4 will be invited to be presented at UbiComp 2019, not UbiComp 2018!

May 15, 2018

Papers with minor revisions will appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 3 (September 1, 2018)
Papers with major revisions which are subsequently accepted may appear in IMWUT 2018 Issue 4 or IMWUT 2019 Issue 1 depending on the resubmission cycle chosen by the author, and would be invited to be presented at UbiComp 2019.

To reiterate: all papers accepted by IMWUT 2017 Issue 4 and IMWUT 2018 Issues 1, 2 or 3 will be invited to be presented at the UbiComp 2018 conference. Submissions appearing in IMWUT Issue 4 for 2018 or Issues 1-3 for 2019 will be invited to be presented at the UbiComp 2019 conference (and so on in subsequent years).
Reviewing

All submissions will be reviewed by the IMWUT Editorial Board. Authors can expect a decision about their paper within 6 weeks from the submission deadline. For more information about the review process please refer to: http://imwut.acm.org.
Rationale for changing the publication model

A thorough, rigorous review & publication model has allowed UbiComp to thrive as a highly selective and lively conference. However, the current process has several limitations:

A single yearly submission deadline means authors must conduct and complete their research projects by a specific time in order to submit papers about their work for review.
PC members, without the ability to request major modifications, often have to reject promising work.
A subsequent “journal version” of a conference article is difficult to develop because the original contribution would have already been published. This also duplicates reviewing efforts.

These issues impact nearly all computer science conferences and have been broadly discussed. They are especially challenging for a community like UbiComp that strives to encourage research that crosses disciplinary lines. Recently, the ACM proposed the creation of a “Proceedings of the ACM (PACM)” journal series, to allow conferences to transition to journal-based publishing with hybrid publication and review models. UbiComp has received approval to be one of the first PACM series. This model has been successful for conferences such as VLDB and SIGGRAPH in the past. The expected benefits of this change are two-fold:
Authors: Flexibility in submission timing and integration of (1) high visibility through presentation in a tier­ 1 conference, (2) journal quality reviews, (3) guaranteed timeliness of reviews, and (4) archival “journal version” of their complete work including full technical details.
Community: A change of reviewing focus that enables the reviewers to ask for important modifications from promising work. Additional review periods should allow growth of high­ quality submissions and the novel model should draw more researchers.

History and future plans

The current UbiComp conference was established in 2013 with the merger of two international conferences, Ubiquitous Computing and Pervasive Computing, which had existed since 1999 and 2002, respectively (see the Past Conferences page for more details). This joint conference is widely considered to be the premier ACM forum on Ubiquitous Computing and related topics. Submissions to the conference average between 400-500/year and the acceptance rate over the past few years has been 20-25%. The conference regularly attracts 600-800 participants each year. This makes UbiComp one of the largest events sponsored by ACM SIGCHI or SIGMOBILE, the two ACM SIGs that co-sponsor UbiComp.

In 2015, ACM introduced a new series of journals under the umbrella of Proceedings of the ACM (PACM). The goal for each of these new journals is to provide an alternative journal-based publication model for major conferences that ACM sponsors. Each PACM title will cross multiple conference communities, and so the name of the journal is chosen to best represent a range of related conferences. One of the first PACM titles to be established was IMWUT: Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. Its title was chosen to suit conferences that deal with technologies and applications that involve interaction with end users in the post-PC era, including mobile, wearable and otherwise ubiquitous designs.

UbiComp is the first conference to join IMWUT. From 2017 onwards, UbiComp no longer considers full paper or note submissions but will invite for presentation papers published on IMWUT. Both ACM SIGMOBILE and SIGCHI are supportive of this decision. The UbiComp conference will maintain its own Steering Committee (http://www.ubicomp.org/sc/), with an elected chair (currently Prof. Anind Dey from Carnegie Mellon University).

It is envisioned that other high-quality conferences will form an association with IMWUT in the future. The IMWUT Editorial Board will actively solicit and review proposals from other conferences whose subject matter and editorial policy are of appropriate standard.

When new conferences join IMWUT, papers presented at UbiComp will be distinguished from papers presented at other conferences through different sections within each issue of the journal. There will also be separate Editorial boards for each conference, as there were separate Technical Program Committees in the past.

Should you have any question or comments about this new publication model, please contact editors@imwut.acm.org.